My smartphone was making me fat

It’s been about five months now since I stopped carrying a smartphone. Recently my BMI re-entered the “healthy” range for the first time in about five years. I’m pretty convinced the two are connected and here's why.

Before I got the Nokia my daily screen time on the phone was on the order of several hours. All those moments sitting still looking at some app really add up. If I have eight hours left in my day after subtracting sleep and work, spending half of those sitting still looking at a phone doesn't leave a lot of time for much else.

Becoming a parent made me feel extremely time-poor. Ditching the phone had the opposite effect. It added extra hours to my day.

Another effect of kicking the smartphone addiction was the return of boredom to my everyday life. This was good! It was something I was specifically aiming for too, like kind of a choosing friction sort of thing.

The secondary effects were a surprise though. The boredom reawoke long dormant impulses to be creative and physically active. Basketball courts and skateparks became places to spend some of all that newfound free time.

Perhaps most important of all was how much my relationship with temptation and willpower has improved as a result of dealing with the addiction to the phone. The problem wasn't just the simple logistical issue of spending a lot of time on the thing, or that the resulting absence of boredom was ultimately harmful. Deeper than that, I think the everyday act of repeatedly choosing to surrender to that craving slowly grew to a more general problem around impulse control.

So after several months clean what I've found is that even the temptation to buy e.g. a chocolate bar during a grocery store trip has started to become way more manageable. Same thing for the occasional bright idea to have a few beers after putting the kids to bed.

I definitely won't be going back. The fucking things are just too engaging and it's no accident. Every app on there has a whole little army of super talented strategists and engineers and designers behind it, all conspiring to squeeze an ever-increasing amount of "engagement" out of you so that they can put a graph going up and to the right in a PowerPoint slide.

Smartphones must seriously be the only modern addiction where people try to recover while still carrying the object of their addiction around with them. Can you imagine how insane it would be to try to recover from alcoholism but continue taking a hip flask everywhere just because it happens to have a really convenient slot to store a drivers' license and credit card?

No, fuck that. I got clean and now I'm staying clean. Once a week or so I pull up the list of apps on the old iPhone and try to find one I can delete. It's down to about 30-ish left. Hopefully within a year or so I'll be finished untangling my life from it completely. Then maybe sell it or something and take the relapse risk down close to zero.

Finding an app you can delete on your phone right now might work pretty well as a first step of your own come to think of it.